When it comes to purchasing ICT services, quality is perhaps the most important purchase criterion — even more so than price. Quality has become even more critical as organizations manage multiple cloud platforms and virtualized infrastructure.

So, back in 2011, T-Systems — the enterprise arm of Deutsche Telekom and a cloud-computing pioneer — launched a global quality improvement campaign to keep operations safe, eliminate risks and turn IT into a catalyst for efficient business processes.

That boils down to this: 99.999 per cent availability, and as few major incidents as possible.

The resulting Zero Outage partner program allows suppliers and access providers to qualify for zero outage certification. And earlier this month at CeBIT 2016 in Hanover, Germany, T-Systems recognized its “partner of the year” in five categories, from among 90 zero outage-certified companies around the world.

The Zero Outage partner program is designed to create a culture focused on keeping systems up and running at all times — using state-of-the-art platforms and clearly defined, consistent processes with rapid time-to-recovery.

T-Systems has more than 600 quality assurance managers worldwide, and provides quality assurance training to some 21,000 in-house IT professionals annually through the company’s Quality Academy.

More than 30 partners and 60 access providers are currently committed to zero outage and work in compliance with T-Systems’ strict quality requirements. This includes fixing major incidents within 20 minutes of incident occurrence and actively supporting problem and change management activities.

In 2015, five independent auditors from TÜV Rheinland conducted an audit of the quality initiative, confirming the Zero Outage partner program offers customers added value because it prevents IT outages.